Conventional techniques for stylizing synthetic renderings of virtual objects to generate a hand-crafted artistic appearance suffer from various limitations that cause errors (e.g., artifacts) in resulting stylizations. For instance, some conventional techniques rely primarily on color information to determine a stylized appearance, but the color information fails to distinguish among different regions having similar colors. Other techniques rely primarily on normals that are useful for a simple shading scenario having a distant light source, but fail to correctly determine locations of some advanced lighting effects, such as shadows or glossy reflections caused by a relatively close light source.
Additional limitations in the conventional techniques generally tend to distort high-level textural features, such as individual brush strokes, or excessively reuse a subset of patches of pixels from a source image to stylize a target image. These additional limitations can result in a distinct wash-out effect manifesting as artificial repetitions or homogeneous areas that do not correlate with the stylized appearance. Because of these limitations, an image synthesized using conventional techniques generally includes artifacts that provide a distinctively synthetic appearance, which decreases the fidelity of the synthesized image and fails to accurately simulate real artwork of an artist.